Chapter 1: What is the story behind Bjork's deadly obsession?
This is exactly right. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that. Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to The Girlfriends, Trust Me Babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you, I got you.
On the Look Back At It podcast. 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me. I'm Sam Jay. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. It was a wild year.
I don't think there's a more important year for black people. Listen to Look Back at It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on?
Biggie.
You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable?
Because I want to get confident.
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Chapter 2: Who was Ricardo Lopez and what drove his obsession with Bjork?
Post was, in a way, a perfect sophomore effort. It reinforced every promise made on Bjork's debut. It doubled down on the sounds Bjork first presented with excellent singles Army of Me and It's Oh So Quiet. And the album solidified Bjork as a one-of-a-kind visual artist with her videos for those tunes.
Each one presenting a new vision imagined by the artist and the groundbreaking director she chose to collaborate with, Michelle Gondry and Spike Jonze among them. It was a vision that cast Bjork as a generational artist, a venerable pixie, five foot four but full of roar, and the slack generation's female answer to the man who fell to earth but with feets and a total babe to boot.
By this time, Bjork's fame was not atomized. By 1996, Bjork was an explosive international pop star. 1996 was a much different time for pop stars than 2025. Nowadays, artists pay a premium for people's attention. The premium they pay is their privacy. In exchange for relevance, artists open up their private worlds to show the public their authentic selves. And no moment is too sacred for some.
And for others, even the most innocuous peek behind the curtain can result in millions of views, likes, shares, and new followers. In 1996, it was very much the opposite. In the 90s, artists put a premium on privacy. Once an artist broke through, there was no need to open themselves up because the media at the time was completely different.
Small armies of publicists and agents and managers ensured that the public saw exactly what the artists and celebrities wanted them to see, spoon-feeding publications to keep their clients' names in the public long enough to maintain continuous relevance. But canned photo ops and prearranged Q&A interviews could only go so far.
It was then as now natural, if you'll excuse the pun, human behavior to want to know more about the artists who inspire us. Enter the paparazzi. The pesky photographers and gossipy so-called journalists still exist, as they always have. It's just that today, they're more of a utility than a nuisance.
In this digital age war for our eyes and ears, artists and celebrities court attention, and thus the paparazzi, for clicks, follows, and relevance. In the navel-gazing 90s, artists loathed the attention of the paparazzi. going to extremes to avoid their cameras and questions, lest their raw comments and unwanted candids would end up in the pages of checkout line trash.
So an itty-bitty Bjork went full Sean Penn on a member of the paparazzi in a Bangkok airport in early 1996, attacking a reporter with her fists in front of her young son and also in front of numerous other cameras. This behavior was not seen as something beyond the pale.
It was only a bad moment for Bjork, who had just completed an international flight and was likely sleep deprived and a bit beyond herself in the moment. Bjork eventually apologized and the incident wasn't in the least bit damaging to her career. Still, the images of Bjork's attack were broadcast all over the world.
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Chapter 3: What events led to Ricardo Lopez's drastic actions against Bjork?
I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at. Oftentimes we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost in things that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin with.
There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase, out of my skin, and I just really regret not living in the present more. Each week we break down the science behind what you're going through and give you real tools to navigate it. Your 20s aren't about having it all figured out. They're about understanding yourself just a little bit better.
Listen to The Psychology of Your 20s on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Dark, syrupy, and persistent. That's how the housing manager at the Hollywood Florida Van Buren Apartments would describe the substance seeping into the ceiling. If there was a smell to it, he couldn't tell. But whatever it was, it didn't seem like the substance was done with the cheap acoustic ceiling tiles.
Slowly, it persisted through the floor from the apartment above and down into this concerned tenant's apartment. There are those moments in life when the world is one way, but then you know if you open your mouth and say what you're about to say, then nothing will ever be the same again.
The housing manager didn't know exactly what the substance was, but he knew that this was one of those moments. He had to do it. One phone call, and the police were there in minutes. Ricardo Lopez had seen Bjork's human behavior video on MTV three years earlier and it changed his life. Bjork was an unimaginable beauty to Ricardo, who even to himself was an unimaginable beast.
18, extremely overweight and hopelessly unable to speak to girls, Ricardo had, to some extent, already given up on the world. a Uruguayan immigrant and helpless mama's boy whose mother lived on another continent in his home country.
Ricardo's life consisted of unsteady work with his older brother's Southeast Florida extermination company, Miami Mice, and increasingly locking himself away in his tiny Van Buren apartment and obsessing over celebrities. Ricardo saw himself as a celebrity someday. Not as an artist though, he did paint and illustrate and wasn't without talent.
He did not see art as his ticket to fame, but simply as a way to occupy his hands in his overactive mind. No, celebrity would come to him by other means. Ricardo had no desire to accomplish anything in exchange for his fame. He just wanted to be famous for the sake of being famous.
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Chapter 4: How did Bjork's life and career evolve before the threat?
Florida police, who had discovered the existence of the bomb and pieced together its intended target across the pond, notified New Scotland Yard immediately. New Scotland Yard sprung into action. A specialist operations group was assembled to counter this potential crime of terrorist obsession.
The only problem was that at the moment, with the package in transit, there was little investigators could do to thwart this deadly threat except wait and pray. With the package tucked away in a cargo plane high above the Atlantic Ocean, authorities went to work informing local London mail sorting stations of the situation and what type of package to be on the lookout for.
They did not inform Bjork. Authorities were confident they'd locate and destroy the deadly package long before it reached its destination. It was decided, for the time being anyway, that there was no need to notify Bjork of the impending danger. If any pesky journalists or paparazzi were to find out, it would be a much bigger, much harder-to-control public crisis.
For now, the situation seemed contained, but time was of the essence. After her Wembley Stadium gig, Bjork settled into her cozy apartment with her son for a couple of days off. Investigators got a lead on which plane the package might be arriving on. A bomb squad was dispatched to Heathrow Airport. The plane was surged and... Nothing. No sign of the package. No sign of a bomb.
At the same time, Bjork and her son went about their daily routine in her apartment, oblivious, completely unaware of the threat against her life.
You see all that damage? That's sulfuric acid.
96%.
I burned myself a little bit in the tongue. I blew, and this is sulfuric acid that was diluted big time with water. Instantly it touched me. I went and washed it off real good. It takes time for this shit to burn. At least a minute to do some serious damage.
New Scotland Yard dispatched investigators to London's sorting stations where mail passed through on its way to Bjork's neighborhood. The package was now either on a truck heading from the airport closer to a sorting station or in the mailbag of a postal worker on its way to Bjork's house.
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Chapter 5: What was the nature of the package sent to Bjork?
He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that. Trust your girlfriends. Listen to The Girlfriends, Trust Me Babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you, I got you.
On the Look Back At It podcast. 1979, that was a big moment for me. 84 was big to me. I'm Sam Jay. And I'm Alex English. Each episode, we pick a year, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it. With our friends, fellow comedians, and favorite authors. Like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s. 84 was a wild year. I don't think there's a more important year for black people.
Listen to Look Back at It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When you feel uncomfortable, what do you put on?
Biggie.
You put on Biggie when you feel uncomfortable?
Because I want to get confident.
This is DJ Hester Prynne's Music is Therapy, a weekly podcast from me, a DJ and licensed therapist. It's Mental Health Month. Let's figure out what actually works.
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